Elliott Smith - Angel in the Snow - Non-Album Tracks (1983-1995)

I've been on a big Elliott Smith kick in recent days, so I'm going to start posting some of his music, even though I already have a ton of other artists I've started dealing with and haven't finished off. I'll get to all of them in time, I promise. Smith was a musical genius. I've got a lot of his stuff to post because he left all sorts of quality songs off his official albums.

As I usually do, I want to start at the beginning and move forward chronologically. One might think of this as a 35 minute album covering his stray tracks from 1993 to 1995, plus four songs at the start of the album, from six to ten years earlier. Those first four songs are kind of juvenilia - Smith was only 14 at the time of the first one, and he was still finding his style and his voice. Heck, he wasn't even Elliott Smith yet, as he was still going by his birth name "Steve Smith." But they're all good songs, so I've included them.

As for the rest of the album, by 1993, Smith was living in Portland and was in a loud "alt. rock" band called Heatmiser. He wrote and sang about half of their songs. Unfortunately, most of their music wasn't very good. And that's not just my opinion - Smith himself felt the same way, calling his singing on their early albums as "embarrassing" and his songs with the band "loud rock songs with no dynamic." Here's a longer quote from him about his time in the band:

"I was being a total actor, acting out a role I didn't even like. I couldn't come out and show where I was coming from. I was always disguised in this loud rock band. [In the beginning] we all got together, everyone wanted to play in a band and it was fun, then after a couple of years we realized that none of us really liked this kind of music, and that we didn't have to play this way. You didn't have to turn all these songs you wrote into these loud... things."

Heatmiser put out two albums and an EP in the time period covered by this compilation, but I've only chosen to include one song from any of that. However, they did put out a final album in 1996, "Mic City Sons," that's much better. I'll include a bunch of Smith's songs from that on my next stray tracks album. Also, some of the Heatmiser songs will reappear on later stray track albums done in Smith's more fitting acoustic style.

Smith also released his first two solo albums in this time frame, "Roman Candle" in 1994 and "Elliott Smith" in 1995. I'm not including any songs from either of those, because any Smith fan should have them already. But there is an official album that I am using: "New Moon." That's an archival double album released four years after Smith died. All the songs on it are good, but I don't think it hangs well as an album, since it covers four years of his career, and the only reason those songs were packaged together is because those were the years he was signed to a particular record company. Instead, I've divided the songs on that album into the different years they were recorded. The first chunk appears here.

01 Untitled Guitar Finger Picking [Instrumental] (Elliott Smith)
02 I Love My Room (Elliott Smith)
03 The Machine (Stranger than Fiction)
04 The Real Estate (Stranger than Fiction)
05 Where I Get It From (Elliott Smith)
06 Antonio Carlos Jobim (Heatmiser)
07 No Confidence Man (Elliott Smith)
08 Crazy Fucker [Another Standard Folk Song] (Elliott Smith)
09 Angel in the Snow (Elliott Smith)
10 High Times (Elliott Smith)
11 Riot Coming (Elliott Smith)
12 Georgia, Georgia (Elliott Smith)
13 Whatever [Folk Song in C] (Elliott Smith)
14 Big Decision (Elliott Smith)
15 Talking to Mary (Elliott Smith)
16 Some Song (Elliott Smith)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15328236/EllittS_1983-1995_AnglinSnw_atse.zip.html

I made the cover art from a photo of Smith playing in concert in 1995.